Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Make everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It’s easy to see without looking too far
That not much is really sacred
-Bob Dylan, It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)
Christmas and New Years always make me think about desire. Desires define our lives and this time of year is rich with chances to see desire working. We’re thinking about desires during the gift-buying process, being merry often means eating, drinking, and other opportunities for excess. Then the new year is all about goal achievements we desire and how we want to change ourselves and our situations.
There are two big questions that come up when I think about desire:
“What do I want to want?” That’s the question that comes to me when thinking about desire. If I could shape my desires, what would they be? I wrote about this question a while ago (short version | long version) and talked about it on the Modern Wisdom Podcast.
And “What do I want?” Some desires are immediately obvious. Many are hidden in our own shadows, something I talked about a bit via Robert Bly’s A Little Book On The Human Shadow in the March 2020 letter.
This edition is being split into two parts. Today’s focuses on certain biological, Buddhist, and Christian perspectives on desire and how we ought to work with it. Next week’s gets a bit more specific: we’ll look at crises of desire, more specific tactics to shaping desire, and spend some more time on our hidden desires.
1. Quotes to Consider
“Satisfy the necessities of life like the butterfly that sips the flower, without destroying its fragrance or its texture.” - Buddha, on his deathbed
"Desire is not of this world… it is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires, it is in order to be initiated into a radically foreign existence." - Rene Girard, Oedipus Unbound
“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” - Blaise Pascal, Pensées
“We live in a sea of creativity made visible.” - Jack Kornfield, No Time Like The Present
“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.” - George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
“If people don't find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones.” Luke Burgis, Wanting
“To be hopeful in hard times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” - Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train
George Bernard Shaw said, "There are two great disappointments in life. Not getting what you want and getting it." George Bernard Shaw
“The human will does what it wants, not what we think it wants. If you want to know what you really want, simply look at what you actually do, and the way you spend your time.” - Luke Burgis, Desires Are Blowin’ in the Wind
2. Desire And Your Biological Incentive System
The author and professor, William Irvine, wrote On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, before settling on Stoicism as his life philosophy (and subsequently writing one of the best modern Stoicism books, A Guide to the Good Life). It’s a book whose ideas I’ve turned to regularly now for nearly a decade, and is probably a big part of why I’ve been fascinated by desire for so long.
You may have encountered some version of this “the satisfied caveman became a dead caveman” evolutionary argument. Irvine connects this to why our Biological Incentive System (BIS) isn’t shaped to make us happy, but instead to make us fit for reproduction and survival:
An early human who was happy with what he had—who spent his days lazing on the savannas of Africa thinking about how good life is—was far less likely to survive and reproduce than his neighbor who spent every waking moment trying to improve his situation. We, the evolutionary descendants of these humans, have inherited this predisposition toward dissatisfaction: we have a BIS that, regardless of what we have, will make us itch for more.
This, in a nutshell, is the human condition: because we have a BIS, we are forced to live under an incentive system that we did not devise, that we cannot escape, and whose incentives not only aren’t calculated to induce us to have happy, meaningful lives but will, if we respond to them, keep us in a state of dissatisfaction.
There are three approaches we can take when deciding how we want to live with our BIS. The first, most popular option, is to become a hedonist:
we can take our BIS as a fact of life and spend our days assiduously seeking its pleasure and avoiding its punishments.
Or we can be an ascetic and struggle against our BIS:
If something feels good, we can refrain from doing it, and if something feels bad, we can welcome it with open arms.
Or we can attempt the middle path between the first two:
We can superimpose our own plan for living over that set by our BIS. Sometimes living in accordance with our plan will earn us the rewards of our BIS. When this happens, we will gladly accept them. Other times, living in accordance with our plan will mean forgoing the rewards offered by our BIS or, even worse, falling victim to its punishments. We will willingly pay this price, knowing that there is no way to avoid it, if our goal is to have the most meaningful life possible, given the existence of our BIS.
Irvine notes that Buddha advocated this middle path, quoting him as saying:
“The [Perfect One] does not seek salvation in austerities, but neither does he for that reason indulge in worldly pleasures, nor live in abundance. The [Perfect One] has found the middle path… There are two extremes… which the man who has given up the world ought not to follow—the habitual practice, on the one hand, of self-indulgence which is unworthy, vain and fit only for the worldly-minded—and the habitual practice, on the other hand, of self-mortification, which is painful, useless and unprofitable.” He defends his rejection of asceticism by arguing that for someone “to satisfy the necessities of life is not evil. To keep the body in good health is a duty, for otherwise we shall not be able to trim the lamp of wisdom, and keep our minds strong and clear."
Earlier in the book, Irvine talks about the Catholic priest St. John of the Cross, who has some ideas that come off as explicitly ascetic, quoting him as saying:
“Deny your desires and you will find what your heart longs for.”
And:
“To reach satisfaction in all, desire satisfaction in nothing,”
And:
“Live as though only God and yourself were in this world, so that your heart may not be detained by anything human."
And then, at length and with a kicker that is they key to any deeply satisfying renunciation:
In order to overcome your desires, says [St. John of the Cross], you should “have habitual desire to imitate Christ in all your deeds by bringing [your] life into conformity with his.” In keeping with this desire, you should “endeavor to be inclined always: not to the easiest, but to the most difficult; not to the most delightful, but to the most distasteful; not to the most gratifying, but to the less pleasant; not to what means rest for you, but to hard work; not to the consoling, but to the unconsoling; not to the most, but to the least; not to the highest and most precious, but to the lowest and most despised; not to wanting something, but to wanting nothing.” This sounds like asceticism, pure and simple, but we should remember that John’s ultimate goal in all this sacrifice is not to vanquish desire but to fulfill his desire to achieve union with God.
His renunciation of everything wasn’t for the sake of renunciation itself, but to keep as much of himself open to God as possible. If denying our desire is just pain or repression, it can become as much of a distraction as serving our pleasures blindly, and it’s much less fun.
The next sections provide more about how we might work with desire.
3. One Way To Work With Desire
Buddhism’s reputation for advocating a total rejection of desire is due, in part, to an unfortunately popular interpretation of the four noble truths. That makes it particularly refreshing when a Buddhist author like Jack Kornfield talks about desire in a clearly human way, as he does in No Time Like The Present:
Desire is part of us. Freedom and love require that you understand desire and see that you are free to choose which desires to follow. There are healthy desires that come from the depths of your being from a healthy love of life. And there are unhealthy desires based on addictions, grasping, greed, fear, inadequacy, and imitation. Explore your desires, and if they are not harmful, try them out.
Desire’s hold on our experience is so intense (whether from a over- or undersupply) that it’s difficult to differentiate from pleasure, but it’s important to try for:
Do not confuse desire with pleasure. Pleasure is a natural and blessed part of our human experience. The problem with the wanting in desire is its grasping, as if grasping one desire after another will create a happy life. But desire is endless. Learn to know the limitations of desire and choose wisely.
Without any desire a human may die quickly. Allowing desires to become too strong drive us into problems we’re all familiar with. Learning to work with desire is the way off that ride. Kornfield suggests the following practice:
Pick a current desire in your life. It can be material, like for a new smartphone or pair of shoes. It can be the desire for a friend's approval, a raise, or to lose weight. Bring it to mind and notice where and how you feel it in your body. Is it warm or cool, contracted or pleasant, tense or empty? Do you feel it in your stomach, your head, your heart? Is it always the same? What stories does it tell about fulfillment, about how satisfied could be, about you, about the future? Notice what emotions you come along with it, like need, longing, judgment, restlessness, fear, or frustration. Notice when you act on desire unconsciously, reflexively. Notice, too, what happens as you become the witness of desire, holding it with loving awareness. Does it shift, increase, disappear, hide? Notice if your desire is healthy or destructive. With loving awareness, you can step outside of desire and, because you are not identified with it, become free to choose.
This question from Nisargadatta seems to point to a path exactly opposite from the apparent asceticism we saw from St. John of the Cross, but one that may lead to a similar place:
My Indian guru, Nisargadatta, explained, "The trouble with you is not that you desire, but that you do not desire enough." He went on, "You limit yourself to desires for certain wants, needs, hopes, and ideas. Why not desire it all? Discover that you are everything and nothing, then your desires will be fulfilled." Honor desire with loving awareness and let it connect you with all life.
Next week we’ll explore other aspects of desire while getting a bit more prescriptive.
4. Miscellany
Steve Brule interviewing Santa. “All praise to Santa. Praise Santa. Worship Santa.”
Twitter thread on why “7 million men aged 25-54 in the ASA are not working”
The Letters of Note Instagram account periodically posts gold like this nugget from Beethoven:
Channel 5 with Alex Jones on his Sandy Hook trial.
Sasha Chapin discovering a strange way to eat his shadow:
"The idea is this. There are parts of you that you consider unacceptable. Habits you don’t like, memories of things you’d rather not have done, thoughts you’d rather suppress. Normally, what you do is a sort of clumsy triage on these parts of yourself, as necessary. Bad memory surfaces? Involuntarily grunt and move on. Binge on your favorite substance? Sober up, feel bad, swear it’ll never happen again. This isn’t all that effective, as evidenced by the fact that you’re constantly suppressing all of this stuff over and over again. It’s like the cartoon closet with a bulging door, ready at any moment to spew unpleasantness all over your inner bedroom. You’re caught in destructive cycles, and, all the way through the cycle, you’re having the same thoughts over and over again. “Why am I doing this? And, by the way, who’s doing this? Me?” Shadow work suggests that you do something different. Instead of trying to disown these parts of you, how about, instead, accepting them. Try, perhaps, to include them in your self-perception. Understand the desires you wish weren’t a part of you. Look those memories square in their awful faces. Own up to your behavior and examine it compassionately. And so on. This process is called integration. Instead of continuing the process of splitting off bits of your soul, you try to heal the split. Proponents of shadow work will tell you that once you get some integration done, you won’t feel as much inner conflict. You’ll spend less time battling random torrents of shame, and more time doing the things you want to, rather than wondering why you’re not."